Google Engineers Refused to Build Security Tool to Win Military Contracts

Can anyone explain what's their "air gap" technology, please?

Government cloud isn’t purely for nefarious purposes. I’ve worked in the past on GOV.UK Verify: an identity verification scheme for logging into government services. We wanted all the benefits that cloud providers give you, but we also needed additional assurance levels above and beyond the norm for our users’ protection.

US (wholly avoidable) intervention in Iraq led to the rise of ISIS. The world is not safer when you go around wacking hornets nests.

Yes, it seems that the traditional "stocks and shares" approach to funding is only suitable for a particular phase of the development of a business.

Past a certain point it's actually bad for the business, employees and customers. I wonder why businesses don't just seek a more stable funding model once they get there.

Pardon my ignorance but this sounds like just the kind of thing that "Bonds" are for. Long term, slow steady growth. It also sounds like specifically the kind of investment opportunity Warren Buffet seeks out, so there must be some logic to it.

The many stories that have been appearing recently on Google's deep cultural changes point to a very basic fact of life: organizations, and even more so, their culture, aren't forever.

As a matter of fact, organization cultural changes can happen very quickly, at the whim of leadership changes.

The trust their users/customers extend these organizations (way too much in the cast of Google) rarely takes this basic fact of life into account.

In the case of Google, the two strong voices of Larry and Sergey held fast the ethical compass of the company for quite a long time and that allowed Google to accumulate massive amounts of goodwill in the market: the average Google user still believes the company is "good" and "can be trusted" and are therefore willing to freely give them massive chunks of their personal data.

Unfortunately, as is wont to happen, the two founders are now sitting on a mountain of money, have pretty much lost all interest in their baby (who wouldn't to be honest) and have for all intent and purposes surrendered the reins to a team of far less ethical-minded, far less principle-guided, far less charismatic, far more greedy set of leaders (Pichai, Green, Wojcicki, ...)

Specifically, when Google hired Diane Green (who's behind the push to work with the military), they totally let the fox in the henhouse.

That SVP has precious little regard for Google's historical cultural tenets (she does pay lip service to them when required, of course, she's smart enough to do that) and is busy doing within Google what she's done previously at VMWare: building a money-making juggernaut (Cloud) using all the tools at her disposal, with precious little regard for the company culture.

She will take on any customers, independent of the ethical aspects of that decision, as long as she's operating within the law.

Consideration such as good or evil (something which, for those who drank the Kool-aid when Google was still young and naive, mattered a whole lot) has exactly zero bearing on her business decisions.

In conclusion: the laws of gravity are what they are, and Google is subject to them like every other corporations. Even if it took longer than for most, they are slowly becoming a standard run-of-the-mill, large, short-sighted, evil corporation with the sole purpose of turning in quarterly profits and making their execs into billionaires.